Friday, October 8, 2010

No, YOU meet ME Halfway!

Time once again for one of my famous and popular Liveblogs. This is a movie I haven't seen before and the comments you read, other than errors corrected during proofreading, were written as I watched the movie. Yes, I will be spoiling every last second of this. Last time around I went to Hulu but today I return to Netflix Instant to watch what is probably the greatest movie ever made about arm wrestling. Going all the way back to 1986, you can now watch me as I watch Over The Top starring Sylvester Stallone.

0:00:15 -- Aw man, 15 seconds in and I already have something to bitch about. The Cannon logo just popped up. That makes it a Golan/Globus production which, to those of you old enough to remember, means that the movie has a 90% chance of sucking at Marianas Trench depths.

0:03:50 -- And it's even directed by Menahem Golan himself. I found this out during the opening credits sequence where Stallone is driving a big rig through some sort of Pacific mountain range while a song about being free or something by a Survivor cover band I'll call The Generics played. A bit of a shock to see Stallone looking so young as opposed to looking like an old man wearing a Sylvester Stallone mask like he does today.

0:04:25 -- Using Made-For-TV-Movie fonts in their credits, I've discovered that Stallone was one of the writers. I would have figured that out for myself when people started speaking in stupid dialogue. The other author is Stirling Silliphant, the guy whose long career in Hollywood included The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. And now he's writing about arm wrestling for a guy whose most famous catchphrase is, "Yo!" Perhaps Silliphant would have been comforted to know that, in only 9 more years, he would be dead.

0:20:00 -- Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk. Excuse me, that didn't seem right. Instead, let me say that Sylvester Stallone plays LINCOLN FUCKING HAWK!!!!! Lincoln Hawk is the kind of name you should only have if you're in a blaxpoitation movie fighting pushers in East Harlem. This Lincoln Hawk, however, is a truck driver picking up his estranged son from military school and drive across country with him in some sort of attempt at bonding. The son, Michael, is a tad annoyed that the only way he could have seen in his dad in the ten years since he was born would have been to buy a ticket so he could watch him fight Apollo Creed. Hawk figures the best way to start bonding with your kid during the Reagan years is to share a steak so they pull into this craphole of a truck stop. This is where they encounter The Smasher. Mr. Smasher had apparently seen Rhinestone and figured a guy who looks like Stallone would be easy pickings in an arm wrestling challenge. Hawk wins of course but is then confronted by another arm wrestler, an EVIL arm wrestler who will be his opponent at some big arm wrestling get together or something. This is called foreshadowing. Stallone learned that in screenwriting school and decided to use the crap out of it here. Oh, Hawk didn't want to leave his kid. He had to because he was framed for drug dealing by the boy's grandfather (Robert Loggia who I think was cast when the studio wanted someone who could act) or some such nonsense. Oh well, I must now leave the comfort of Microsoft Word and click back over to the Netflix tab. See you in a bit.

0:25:00 -- Kenny Loggins is singing a song called Meet Me Halfway. I know it's him because it sounds like every other song he ever sang. Meanwhile, Hawk is actually managing to make up for 10 years of shitty parenting and successfully bonding with his son. This once again proves something that movies have proven again and again. There is no problem, be it needing to get laid or trying to deal with the aftermath of nuclear war, that can't be solved with a road trip.

0:27:15 -- Now Hawk wants Michael to actually drive his truck. This is good news for me as I'm assuming the scene that follows will be the truck driving off a cliff resulting in their fiery deaths.

This seems like a good place to stop since, as is always the case with my Liveblogs, this is getting long. Will Linc and Michael survive this incredibly stupid action and go on to become the greatest father/son arm wrestling team in history? Tune in next time to find out.

I'm reminded of the SNL sketch where Stallone encounters Norm MacDonald, who's dying from his injuries in a car accident, and all MacDonald can talk about is how awful his movies are. "Kramer Vs. Kramer, that was a movie about divorce, but you know what it didn't have- ARM WRESTLING!"